Hey everyone, quick heads up about the development of Arcanium. We are encountering some delays as you can see, but fear not everything is falling in order. I’d like to apologize and thank you for your tremendous patience.
We have been tasked to package and deliver the final translation documents by the end of today, that's over 45,000 words that will be translated in over 30 languages. We needed to get that out of the way, it slowed us down, now we're back on finishing the last bits of content.
A bit more updates about the content:
- The core loop changes have been integrated, everything is butter smooth. More on that soon.
- Visual Polish: This has been the center of our focus. We wanted to finish what we had started with a bang. So, we ordered a batch of 150 fresh new ability illustrations from a great art outsourcing studio. We also have partnered with a small but mighty VFX studio to create 200 new spell FX that will be in the game at 1.0 (We're about 2/5 of the way now). Lastly, FX wouldn’t be anything with sounds, so our sound designer extraordinaire Jeff is creating 200 new custom sound FX to go with the new spell VFX. The game will look and feel better than ever.
- Performance Optimization: Another focus has been Optimization, and making sure that any machine will be able to run the game with at least a decent frame rate at low settings. We were able to improve the performance so much that the game is now able to run at over 200fps on a machine that was getting barely 30fps at the time. We aren’t completely done with optimization either, and it will only get better moving forward.
- Core loop and core mechanics: This is the big one. We analyzed what was making the game fun, and what was doing just the opposite. We have revisited mechanics that were convoluted and tweaked some rules to make Arcanium the best it can be while being easier to pick up for new players. The exploration is more straightforward than it used to and deeper, giving players a lot of agency. We added World quests to give directionality to the runs, and justify having such a vast map to explore. We paced the runs to be more action-packed and a bit shorter than before.
- Content: We plan on releasing the game with 10 Heroes by the end of the year, and will push some regular content updates after that. The Hero roster will be: Leon, Milady, Aurora, Shinzo, Ragnarok, Tara, Mozebus, Angorn, Misty and Lazaar, our latest hero. The latest Heroes are still being tested and balanced, and almost ready for prime time.
Akhan is currently getting his illustration worked on, we’ll post a WIP this week. He’s fully integrated into the game and you’ll be able to fight him on every run after defeating any of the Province Bosses. We’ll post some more about Akhan very soon to explain the mechanics of his battle.
The third Province, the Scorched Lands is fully functional but still needs some Events to be added, and a good visual polish pass over the 3D battlegrounds assets to be done. The Province has its 44 tiles added to the main continent, 9 new enemies, and a new final boss: “Noctus, the Fallen Prince”.
We completely revisited the Artifacts and removed the ones that our community didn’t think were that great. We reworked them, and added the Scorched Lands Artifacts to the existing pool. We now have a total of 150 unique Artifacts that can be found in runs and added to your Heroes.
Heirlooms are stronger than ever with 3 per Hero (30 Heirlooms total at 1.0). We also changed how Heirlooms work for clarity and simplicity both. Heirlooms will now drop from Shard battles as a reward, and will be equipped in slot #4 on your Heroes that will be reserved for Heirlooms only. We also tweaked the Heirloom Artifact cards to drastically enhance one aspect of each Heroes and change the way you play them.
- Tutorial: If you’re already familiar with the game, this won’t really be that interesting to you. But new players will be able to launch Arcanium for the first time and experience our new Tutorial mode, a short and immersive mini-map area with a dozen tiles to visit that will teach the ropes. The tutorial will be able to be skipped, and replayed at any time.
There’s a lot more that we haven’t mentioned, but we will keep that for later and let you experience the changes yourself. Speaking of which you might wonder when we’ll be releasing the next patch for Arcanium...
We will probably release a Beta version of the patch in the first weeks of October on Steam to make sure that most of the bugs are out of the picture, and shortly after that release the patch LIVE on Steam. The next patch will be as close as it gets from the 1.0 patch, and we’ll spend the last weeks before launch polishing the content, balancing and ironing out the bugs.
Thanks again for reading and for your patience, if you have any questions please join the general chat on Discord and we’ll try to answer all of them.
-The Arcanium team